


Going Under

by DementedPixie



Series: Demented Pixie's Pros Fic [20]
Category: The Professionals (TV 1977)
Genre: Hurt/Comfort, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-10
Updated: 2020-02-10
Packaged: 2021-02-27 19:33:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,001
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22651054
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DementedPixie/pseuds/DementedPixie
Summary: PLEASE DO NOT RE-POST THIS STORY ON ANY OTHER PLATFORM.
Relationships: William Bodie/Ray Doyle
Series: Demented Pixie's Pros Fic [20]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1264832
Kudos: 6





	Going Under

**Author's Note:**

> My name is Demented Pixie and I’m a Pros fan, but that hasn’t always been my name. If you knew me as In Love With Both and you’re a friend, then you’ll already know why I left the fandom some years back. But, hey, a girl can change her mind, and I have therefore decided to re-share my Professionals fanfiction on this amazing Archive – no changes, no improvements, no alterations. I’ll be posting them just as they were written. No comments, no trolls, and no betas. Just me and my stories. I’m sharing them so that they can take their place in the archive, but I’m also sharing them for the Pros generation, for those future generations yet to discover Bodie and Doyle, and for Sandra, who has never ceased waving pompoms for all Pros fanfiction writers.  
> The following story was written by me in 2015.

Suddenly, I’m on my own. Ray came as far as he could, squeezed my hand, dropped a kiss on my forehead, but he can’t come any further. Then I find myself being wheeled down a corridor that leads to a small room, big enough for the hospital bed with a small space all around it, with cupboards and work surfaces lining the walls. 

They talk to each other, but not to me, about how they’ve been kept waiting and are glad to be getting on with it. They’ve got a busy schedule today, it appears. 

A smiling nurse undoes the gown that has been providing me with a small amount of dignity and asks me to lay back. I do so, looking up at the posters of cartoon characters that cover the ceiling tiles. I suppose it would be too much to ask for them to be page three models. She, the nurse, and definitely not a page three model, fixes sticky pads to my chest, then electrodes to the pads, and then a noise starts to echo around the room - a steady, if somewhat fast, thud, thud, thud. 

I finally grasp, and feel stupid for not realising straight away, that the thudding noise is my pulse, being broadcast for everyone to hear.

A man dressed in scrubs appears through some double doors at the end of the room, looks at me, checks the clock and goes back. I check the clock too. It’s 1.17pm. As the doors swing back, I glimpse what I now realise is the operating theatre. Is he the surgeon? Does he know what he’s doing? What if he removes the wrong thing? Doyle had joked about writing on my stomach the words ‘remove gallbladder’ but now it suddenly feels like a really good idea rather than a joke. 

The anaesthetist arrives, wraps a tourniquet around my left arm and searches for a vein in the back of my hand. 

Nobody talks. 

They work to the beat of my pulse. 

My vein, it appears, doesn’t want to be found and he has to tap the back of my hand to encourage it out of hiding. Finally satisfied, he inserts a needle into the back of my hand. It stings. He secures it with six strips of sticky tape. 

He gives me a reassuring smile but no conversation.

It’s strange, this quiet waiting. I’d always thought people were told to count backwards down from ten, but we’re sitting here in silence. 

A moment of panic.

How long have I got? What if this is it? Isn’t my life supposed to be flashing before me? What do I want my possibly last thoughts in this world to be of? 

Doyle. I think of Doyle. I think of him in the ambulance, looking up at me through the breathing mask, trying to smile. I think of watching him in the operating theatre, while surgeons dug for Mayli’s bullets. I think about how I nearly lost him, and all that we’ve had since. 

Yes, I want my last thoughts to be of Ray Doyle...

“Mr Bodie? I’m Jason. You’re okay. The operation was a success. Can you hear me?”

“Doyle...” I think that’s my voice but it sounds like a cat trying to get rid of fur balls. 

“Pardon? What was that?”

I try again. “Doyle.”

“That’s your partner, isn’t it? Tell me about him?”

I try to move my tongue but it seems to be glued to the roof of my mouth. “Thirsty.”

“Let me get you a drink. Gin and tonic okay?”

I smile. 

I look at the clock. 2.27pm. 

I suck messily on the straw that he places in my mouth and water drips on my chest.

“Better?”

Not really, but I’m being polite. “Hmmm. What did I say?”

He looks at me, in the same kind of way that a research scientist looks at a rat. “Don’t you remember? You were telling me about your partner.”

And so I tell him. How Ray Doyle is the one person in this world who means everything to me and how I couldn’t be without him. How we’ve been through hell and back together, always together. 

He listens, not to what I am saying, but so he can judge whether I am compos mentis enough for him to discharge me to the care of the ward nurse who has just arrived.

“Ray Doyle,” I say again, more to myself than Jason.

“Yes I know,” he says. “You were telling me about him. Don’t you remember?” Again he looks directly at me, assessing my reactions.

“Yeah, of course,” I lie. And then I realise what it is that’s confusing me. I frown. “Not sure what I remember and what’s a dream.”

“You know,” he says, conversationally, “you never get that time back.”

I look at him, confused. “Sorry?”

He picks up my chart and starts reading it. “When you’re asleep your body is aware of the passage of time. You sleep, dream, and you know you’ve been asleep when you wake up. But when you’re under anaesthetic your body doesn’t remember what happens to it. You never get the time back. You’ve just lost an hour of your life and you’ll never get it back. Interesting, isn’t it?”

My bed starts to move. He talks to the nurse about me, over my head. I presume I’m not meant to join in the conversation, so don’t bother.

I think about this, as they wheel me back to the ward on my gliding bed. All that time that Doyle had been unconscious, was it like being asleep, or had he lost all those hours of his life? What had happened in his dreams while he was out of it? 

I never thought to ask him. 

As the bed is pushed back to my corner of the ward, there he is, leaning on the windowsill, waiting for me, a smile on his face. 

I wonder if he’ll tell me if I ask.


End file.
